Shen Baozhen: A Fort, a Mountain Road, and the Qing Court’s Forced Gaze upon Taiwan

30-Second Overview: On June 17, 1874, Shen Baozhen arrived in Anping, taking on the Qing Court’s Taiwan maritime defense and diplomatic tasks following the Mudan Incident. ¹ In the following years, the Everlasting Gold City in Tainan, the Hengchun County seat, roads leading to the "Back Mountain" (Hou Shan), and new survey maps appeared in succession. ^{2 3 1} These facilities firmly placed Taiwan within the Qing Court’s national map, while also revealing an uncomfortable question: who exactly did modern roads open up for?

On June 17, 1874, Shen Baozhen arrived in Anping. Three months later, the Erkunshen Fort began construction in Anping, Tainan. In 1876, the characters "Everlasting Gold City" (Yizai Jin Cheng) were carved above the city gate. ^{2 3} The same person, one fort, and a mountain road to the Back Mountain connect a rarely juxtaposed chapter in late Qing Taiwan history.

Figure: Portrait of Shen Baozhen, c. 1870. Source: Wikimedia Commons file page; page marked Public domain ¹¹.

📝 Curator’s Note: What makes Shen Baozhen most memorable is not the number of historical sites he left for Taiwan, but how he translated a diplomatic crisis into surveying, fortification, county establishment, and military roads. And every translation changes the people on the land.

How a Jinshi Entered the Shipyard

Shen Baozhen was from Houguan, Fujian, and was the nephew and son-in-law of Lin Zexu. This family connection is often reduced to a simple label, but the more critical turning point occurred in 1865: after his mother’s death, he returned to Fuzhou to observe mourning, and Zuo Zongtang subsequently recruited him to head the Fuzhou Ship Administration. ⁴

The Fuzhou Ship Administration presented Shen Baozhen with a type of work distinct from traditional local administration. The shipyard required integrating foreign engineers, warship construction, surveying science, and new academies into a single system; the academies transformed technical training into state capacity. Local historical data from the Fuzhou Municipal Government records that the Ship Administration established academies and dispatched students to Britain and France to study steamship manufacturing and navigation. Shen Baozhen later brought this network of personnel and technology to Taiwan. ⁴ Research from Cambridge University Press places him at the core of late Qing modernization cases: he shifted his career—which could have proceeded smoothly—from building a modern naval shipyard and academies, a path that simultaneously contained the fruits of institutional innovation and the failures of insufficient resources. ¹²

This background changes how we view Shen Baozhen. What he brought to Taiwan was not just an imperial commissioner’s decree, but a way of thinking that broke down maritime defense into ships, cannons, schools, maps, and talent.

Why the Ship Administration Minister from Fuzhou Landed in Anping

Born in 1820 in Houguan, Fujian, Shen Baozhen passed the imperial examination in 1847. He later served as Minister of the General Administration of the Maritime Trade (Zongli Ship Zheng Da Chen), Imperial Commissioner for Taiwan Maritime Defense, and Viceroy of the Liangjiang Region concurrently with the Minister of Southern Maritime Trade. ² He was not a local official temporarily dispatched to Taiwan, but a man already familiar with shipyards, warships, academies, and surveying within the Qing Court’s Self-Strengthening and maritime defense system.

The starting point returns to 1871. The Ryukyuan ship Shan Yuan drifted to southeastern Taiwan; 66 crew members landed, 54 were killed, and 12 were rescued and sent back to Ryukyu by the Qing government. Three years later, Japan sent troops to the Hengchun Peninsula under the pretext of punishing the murderers. ¹ For the Qing Court, this was not merely a local conflict. Japan turned "who has the right to manage this land" into an international issue; the Qing Court’s previous vague description of mountainous areas as "outside civilization" suddenly became insufficient.

After Japanese troops landed in Hengchun in May 1874, Shen Baozhen went to Taiwan under the name of "Imperial Commissioner for Handling Taiwan and Other Coastal Defense Matters and Negotiating with Various Countries," arriving in Anping on June 17. ¹ He also brought Eugène-Charles d’Aiguebelle (Ri Yige), a French instructor from the Mawei Ship Administration Academy, and Ship Administration students. The subsequent maps, forts, and coastal surveys were not the whims of individual officials, but the unfolding of the Ship Administration’s new technical system on the ground in Taiwan. ¹

From Local Conflict to International Law and Sovereignty

The difficulty of the Mudan Incident lay not only in the Japanese landing. Japan viewed the Ryukyuans killed in 1871 as Japanese subjects, while the Qing Court had to answer: did the lands in southeastern Taiwan, not directly managed by Qing county offices, belong to the territory for which the Qing Court could be held responsible? Cambridge research points out that the Taiwan crisis from May to December 1874 erupted under the overlap of Japan’s integration of Ryukyu, the Qing Court’s ambiguous territorial claims, and the Western international law concept of "effective occupation." ¹³

Thus, Shen Baozhen played the roles of military commander and diplomatic negotiator simultaneously. He needed to withdraw the Japanese troops while enabling the Qing Court to explain how it governed Taiwan in the future. The subsequent establishment of counties, fortification, surveying, and roads were administrative answers to this question. They gradually pulled areas previously called "outside civilization" into the scope the Qing Court could describe and claim. ^{1 13}

A Fort Standing First by the Sea

The first concrete problem Shen Baozhen faced in Anping was that the mouth of Taiwan Prefecture City lacked sufficient modern defenses. Data from the Tainan Municipal Government Cultural Bureau records that the Erkunshen Fort utilized bricks from Fort Zeelandia, was built with Western-style red bricks, had a moat around it, was completed in 1876, and was equipped with five British-made Armstrong 18-ton muzzle-loading cannons. ³

_Figure: Entrance to the Everlasting Gold City gate. Photograph by Feng Daoming, 2018; Source: Wikimedia Commons file page, under CC BY 4.0 ¹⁴._

The significance of the fort lies not just in the weight of its cannons. It elevated the matter of "defending Taiwan Prefecture City" from local guard duties to a maritime defense project the Qing Court must invest in. Simultaneously, it compressed French engineering knowledge, British cannons, and Fuzhou Ship Administration talent into a visible building in Anping. ¹

📝 Curator’s Note: The Everlasting Gold City is like a late Qing receipt: the Qing Court finally admitted that Taiwan could not be guarded solely by old-style garrisons. But this receipt also reminds us that states often only begin to pay the cost for a piece of land when a crisis approaches.

The Qing Court Did Not Rely Solely on Local Armaments

When crisis approached, Taiwan’s existing weapons and troops did not fit the imagination of "modern maritime defense." Late Qing research indicates that some troops defending Taiwan used matchlock guns, and Taiwan soldiers even fought with bows, arrows, and spears. Li Hongzhang suggested dispatching Tang Dingkui’s Huai Army; the elite forces that finally arrived in Taiwan numbered approximately 6,500. ¹³

Shen Baozhen also requested in 1874 to purchase 15,000 Remington breech-loading rifles, planning to procure ironclads, rifles, cannons, and ammunition through foreign loans. This added an invisible background layer to the red brick walls of the Everlasting Gold City: it was not a local project completed behind closed doors, but the result of global arms markets, foreign banks, the Fuzhou Ship Administration, and Qing Court finances connecting simultaneously. ¹³

The Qing Court thus learned a very realistic lesson from the Taiwan crisis: shipyards could be built domestically, weapons could be attempted to be replicated, but when war actually broke out, speed, quality, and cash often still had to be sought from the world. Shen Baozhen’s maritime defense thinking became global from this point. ¹³

A Map Turning the Coastline into a National Border

After Shen Baozhen arrived in Taiwan, personnel from the Mawei Ship Administration Academy began Western-style surveying. Indigenous literature records that d’Aiguebelle participated in recommendations for the Anping Fort and instructed Ship Administration students like Wei Han to draw the Map of Taiwan Prefecture City and Anping Harbor and the Full Map of Taiwan Prefecture City Streets. Yan Fu surveyed the southeastern mouth of Taiwan aboard the Yangwu warship. ¹

What these people did looked like technical work on the surface, but in reality, it rewrote governance methods. The map placed ports, roads, garrisons, government offices, and settlements into the same coordinate system, allowing the Qing Court to explain where a county was, where a department was, and where troops should be stationed. It transformed "Taiwan" from an island needing defense into an administrative space that could be measured, zoned, and managed. ¹

Figure: 1875 Qing-administered Taiwan Administrative Division Map. Author: Liaon98; Source: Wikimedia Commons file page, under CC BY-SA 3.0 Taiwan ¹⁵.

After 1875, new administrative units such as Hengchun County, Beinan Department, and Pulishe Department appeared in succession in the Qing Court’s governance plans. The related surveying results later left over 2,000 place names, becoming important historical materials for studying the front mountains, back mountains, and administrative expansion of late Qing Taiwan. ¹

English academic research places this turning point in a larger East Asian context: Taiwan’s position was seen by the Qing Court as both a maritime boundary and a base that could be exploited by hostile forces. Therefore, maritime defense and administration were not parallel lines, but two sides of the same national security imagination. ¹⁶

The Back Mountain Was Not a Mineral List Waiting for Development

In their memorial "Jointly Planning the Overall Situation of Taiwan," Shen Baozhen and others wrote the reasons for "opening the mountains" quite directly:

"For the sake of preventing danger, not for the sake of generating profit." ⁶

This sentence is worth reading in context. The memorial admitted that rumors of gold sand, silver mines, and timber in the Back Mountain might not bring sufficient returns; the real reason they could not stop working was that Taiwan was viewed as the left screen of Fujian and the gateway to the seven provinces. The northern route had already reached Xiugulan, the southern route had passed Beinanmi, and the central route was preparing to cross Shuangshan eastward. ⁶ Thus, the three roads were not merely transportation projects, but military deployments pushing the coastal defense line into the mountains.

This statement also corrects the later common narrative of "opening roads for development." Shen Baozhen himself placed prevention before profit. Roads, settlers, and administrative setups had to allow the Qing Court to enter first before discussing products and taxes. This security logic turned the Back Mountain into a space the state must control, and placed Indigenous living areas back into military and administrative coordinates. ^{1 6}

The Other Side of Hengchun City and "Opening the Mountains and Pacifying the Indigenous"

After inspecting Langqiao, Shen Baozhen petitioned and received approval to build a city and establish a county, renaming Langqiao to Hengchun and planning Hengchun City. National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts collection data records that Hengchun City construction began in 1875 and was completed in 1879. ² For the Qing Court, this was a method to fix the southern coast onto the administrative map. For the communities living there, the city walls, roads, and government offices represented the arrival of new armies, tax systems, and commands.

The Qing Court then promoted "Opening the Mountains and Pacifying the Indigenous": northern, central, and southern routes extended simultaneously toward the Back Mountain, handling Indigenous communities through pacification, household registration, administrative establishment, and military action. Research in Indigenous literature points out that maps and administrative setups after the Mudan Incident indeed allowed the state system to penetrate deeper into the Hengchun Peninsula and eastern Taiwan; but the same process was accompanied by the weakening of Indigenous autonomy, and existing records are almost entirely texts and maps left by external regimes. ¹

Here, we need to invert the common saying. People often understand "Opening the Mountains and Pacifying the Indigenous" as the starting point of road opening, local development, and modernization construction. But roads could be通行 (traversed) precisely because armies entered first, administration landed first, and land originally controlled by different communities was renamed and rearranged. Shen Baozhen’s governance project thus had two faces simultaneously: it allowed the Qing Court to begin taking responsibility for Taiwan, and it made Indigenous peoples bear the pressure of state expansion. ¹

Whom the Ban Lifted Was Directed At

If "opening the mountains" lacked settlers, roads would be blocked by weeds again; but to recruit settlers, the Qing Court first had to handle the old bans on people crossing to Taiwan and entering Indigenous zones. In an 1875 memorial, Shen Baozhen listed multiple restrictions, including prohibiting mainland people from sneaking across, limiting Taiwanese people from entering Indigenous zones, and punishing behaviors such as rattan extraction, deer hunting, logging, and palm harvesting. The tone of the memorial was pragmatic: "To open the mountains without first recruiting settlers means the road is open but still blocked; to recruit settlers without first lifting the ban means the people hesitate and do not advance." ⁷

He simultaneously requested to lift bans on iron and bamboo, arguing that these restrictions easily became tools for military conscription extortion against civilians. ⁷ This is a often overlooked side of Shen Baozhen’s policy: he indeed attempted to weaken the constraints of some old systems on merchants and settlers, but this "ban lifting" primarily served state goals of recruiting settlers, transportation, and defense, and was not equivalent to acknowledging Indigenous autonomy over land.

Using the Zheng Chenggong Shrine to Place Taiwan into a History of Loyalty

What Shen Baozhen handled in Taiwan was another, quieter but politically weighty project: arranging who could represent Taiwan’s history. On January 12, 1875, he petitioned to posthumously honor Zheng Chenggong and establish a dedicated shrine in the Taiwan prefecture, writing in the memorial: "I implore you to bestow a posthumous title and build a shrine, to accord with public sentiment and to clarify great righteousness." ⁸

This request moved Zheng Chenggong from local private worship into the Qing Court’s sacrificial canon, and retranslated Taiwan’s Ming Zheng memory into a story of loyalty acceptable to the Qing. Shen Baozhen was not just building forts by the sea; he was simultaneously seeking, within temples, posthumous titles, and sacrificial systems, a language that could connect Taiwan’s folk emotions to the Qing Court’s political order. This cultural policy operated alongside the addition of prefectures and counties and road construction, making governance rely not only on armies, but on who was allowed to become a hero in shared memory. ⁸

The Blanks Left by the Beijing Convention

On October 31, 1874, China and Japan signed the Beijing Convention. The Qing Court agreed to compensate the families of the killed and compensate Japan for expenses in building roads and houses in Taiwan; data compiled by the Kenting National Park Headquarters estimates the relevant amount at approximately 500,000 taels of silver. ¹ Japanese troops withdrew, the Qing Court temporarily avoided war, and Shen Baozhen’s military-political task received a result he could report to the court.

But the text of the agreement left questions. Indigenous literature quotes the Qing Court’s statement to the British envoy at the time: "Although these people are not governed by Chinese law, their land is ultimately not outside Chinese territory." ¹ This sentence stated sovereignty clearly, but did not ask how Indigenous peoples understood their own land, nor did it place them at the negotiation table. The subsequent establishment of counties, surveying, and roads continued forward in this blank.

📝 Curator’s Note: The most difficult part of Shen Baozhen’s story is that we cannot simply write him as a "pioneer of modernization," nor reduce him to an executor of expansion; the true historical weight lies in the fact that the same city protected a government, redrew a piece of land, and changed the options for the land’s original residents simultaneously.

He Did Not Wait for Taiwan’s Provincial Establishment, But Wrote the Reasons for Provincial System First

Shen Baozhen died in 1879; Taiwan’s provincial establishment was completed in 1885. ^{2 10} He did not see the Taiwan Governor system formally established with his own eyes, but in the Jointly Planning the Overall Situation of Taiwan memorial, he had already discussed that "in the future, there must be discussions of dividing the province to assign specific responsibilities," while reminding that Taiwan and Fujian relied on each other for funding, talent, rice, and Ship Administration supplies. ⁶

This is not a simple straight line of "Shen Baozhen planned, Liu Mingchuan completed." Cambridge research points out that Shen Baozhen and Zuo Zongtang in the 1870s both used historical frontier governance experiences from Chinese history to argue that Taiwan and Xinjiang needed changes in governance methods; they placed reclamation, administration, and defense within the same political economy problem. ⁹ When Taiwan was later established as a province, it continued this state imagination binding land, tax revenue, population, and military responsibility together.

A Memorial Is Not All of Taiwan

Shen Baozhen’s memorials are important because they allow us to hear how the Qing Court explained "opening the mountains," "lifting bans," and "protecting Taiwan." But memorials are still the voice of the government; Indigenous literature reminds us that maps and administrative files left by the Mudan Incident and subsequent governance were mostly drawn by external regimes, and Indigenous records themselves are very lacking. ¹

Therefore, reading Shen Baozhen cannot only ask how much construction he did, but also ask: in whose language were these constructions named for the land? In whose law were residents handled? In whose map was sovereignty proven? The "development" and "frontier governance" discussed in late Qing research, if placed back in the scenes of Hengchun, Beinan, and the Back Mountain, will simultaneously contain defense, migration, taxation, and community conflict. ⁹

After the Fort Remains

Standing before the gate of the Everlasting Gold City today, the easiest things to see are the red bricks, the moat, and the four characters "Everlasting Gold City." Less visible is how the new order after 1874 operated together: the Fuzhou Ship Administration sent technology to Anping, the Qing Court made maritime defense a state responsibility, Hengchun City incorporated the southern end into county governance, and roads and maps turned the Back Mountain into a space that could be described by administrative organs. ^{3 5 1}

Shen Baozhen’s legacy is therefore not just a fort. It is a question: when the state finally was willing to see Taiwan, did it see only coasts, ports, roads, and manageable borders, or did it also see the people who were already living in these places?

The 1874 crisis has long ended ¹; the Everlasting Gold City remains in Anping’s tree shadows, and Hengchun City still has walls to follow. What has not ended is how we read the bricks, roads, and maps that remain: they prove that Shen Baozhen changed Taiwan, and force us to admit that change never happened only in government offices.

Further Reading

• Indigenous Literature: Map Historical Materials and Spatial Exploration of the Mudan Incident (Part 2)
• Tainan Municipal Government Cultural Bureau: Everlasting Gold City
• Kenting National Park Headquarters: The Mudan Incident Storm
• Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History: Taiwan and Modern China

References